Exploring The Corporate Gaze

Drawing inspiration from the concept of the “robot-readable world” — i.e. people and places as perceived through the eyes of smart machines such as face-detecting cameras — Quiet Babylon describes the “corporate gaze”:

There’s another class of entities to whom we have already granted personhood. I’m speaking, of course, about corporations. Immortal entities of terrifying inhuman thinking, capable of entering into contracts and incurring debts, and owed a subset of the rights which we accord to human persons. I’m interested in the aesthetics of the corporate readable world, and their truly alien gaze.

Corporations communicate to us through money, press-releases, and advertising, always advertising. For a glimpse of the corporate readable world, look to Twitter’s routinely useless “who to follow” panel, Klout’s laughable ideas about what you are influential about, Facebook’s clumsy attempts to get you to join a dating site, and Google’s demented, personalized, Gmail ads. You can see it in your credit rating, and your position on the actuarial tables. You can see it in Blackwater/Xe/Academi’s attempt to conceal itself by shedding names like a trickster god shedding skins.

These aren’t visually appealing […] but they’re an aesthetic nonetheless.

America! Look what three decades of Coca Cola Corpocracy have brought you! Knee deep in humanocidal corporate nuclear wastes, deep debts to China, Industries gone off-shore, Rich got much richer, U.S. Dollar buys less each day, food that kills, Embarrassing fall in schools to 39th in this world, workers wages stagnate for the three decades, Asian car take-over in America, well educated youth unable to find work, sustainable, payable mortgage homes of reasonable size simply not built for workers, constant warring for oil, even as China develops cheapest Thorium fissioning energy to replace oil the world over, unhappy people with highest drunk and drugged rates on earth, prisons store bucks at great cost, no education for them, Detroit City, Third World conditions to be repeated by bankrupting Californian cities, payments to Israel breaking the American worker’s back.

<!–
@page { margin: 0.79in }
P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }
A:link { so-language: zxx }
“Had the $4 Trillions+ spent on Iraq,
been spent even only on conventional Solar/Thermal development of
South Western U.S.A. – Today, Americans would receive a huge ROI (
“Return On Investment”) in cheap electricity, in place of
horrendous tax rates to service unpayable war debt to China.
Americans would be gainfully working, using this renewable,
perpetual, eternal, clean, radiation free, radioactive waste free,
domestic, electricity source – to compete in world markets with
well priced products, to irrigate dry lands, to heat and cool homes,
and much less foreign oil would have be imported, fewer “Parasite
Nations” supported. This is the lost “opportunity cost” for
having Saddam’s scrotum on the Bushes mantlepiece? Shiite eh!”

P.S., (Oil, gas, wells do go dry, not
really sourced from an eternal pipe up &Allah’s-ass, as some
believe – But, the Sun never stops shining, Wind blows forever)

America! Look what three decades of Coca Cola Corpocracy have brought you! Knee deep in humanocidal corporate nuclear wastes, deep debts to China, Industries gone off-shore, Rich got much richer, U.S. Dollar buys less each day, food that kills, Embarrassing fall in schools to 39th in this world, workers wages stagnate for the three decades, Asian car take-over in America, well educated youth unable to find work, sustainable, payable mortgage homes of reasonable size simply not built for workers, constant warring for oil, even as China develops cheapest Thorium fissioning energy to replace oil the world over, unhappy people with highest drunk and drugged rates on earth, prisons store bucks at great cost, no education for them, Detroit City, Third World conditions to be repeated by bankrupting Californian cities, payments to Israel breaking the American worker’s back.

<!–
@page { margin: 0.79in }
P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }
A:link { so-language: zxx }
“Had the $4 Trillions+ spent on Iraq,
been spent even only on conventional Solar/Thermal development of
South Western U.S.A. – Today, Americans would receive a huge ROI (
“Return On Investment”) in cheap electricity, in place of
horrendous tax rates to service unpayable war debt to China.
Americans would be gainfully working, using this renewable,
perpetual, eternal, clean, radiation free, radioactive waste free,
domestic, electricity source – to compete in world markets with
well priced products, to irrigate dry lands, to heat and cool homes,
and much less foreign oil would have be imported, fewer “Parasite
Nations” supported. This is the lost “opportunity cost” for
having Saddam’s scrotum on the Bushes mantlepiece? Shiite eh!”

P.S., (Oil, gas, wells do go dry, not
really sourced from an eternal pipe up &Allah’s-ass, as some
believe – But, the Sun never stops shining, Wind blows forever)